Moravian College Choir alumni honor Richard and Monica Schantz

October celebration raises $28,000 to endow music scholarship

(Bethlehem, Pa.)—A gathering of choir alumni and friends from the 38 years that Richard and Monica Schantz led the Moravian College Music Department and built its choral music program raised funds to endow a music scholarship in their honor.

An October 25 tribute at the College, commemorating Richard Schantz’s 75th birthday, drew more than 200 alumni, faculty, and friends of Schantz’s choirs. They donated almost $28,000, more than enough to endow the Richard and Monica Schantz Music Scholarship. At Moravian College, $25,000 is the baseline amount needed to endow a scholarship.

The Schantz party was the idea of Linda Pettinelli ’91, who proposed it in August to Monica Schantz. “To put it together and raise that much money in less than three months is simply amazing,” said Joan Lardner Paul, director of major gifts at the College, whose areas of concentration include the arts, Reeves Library, and Moravian’s joint program with St. Luke’s Hospital School of Nursing.

Contributors came from choir alumni from every class year since 1956, as well as alumni of the 1940s and early 1950s who are longtime patrons of the Moravian College Christmas Vespers and other musical events. The Schantzes created the Christmas Vespers program as it exists today, and their choirs performed at 240 Vespers services.

The event included a display on the stage of Foy Hall of choir memorabilia—programs, scores, and photographs—with a selection of paintings and drawings by Richard Schantz.

The main event included a sing-along (conducted by Denise Parker and accompanied by Janice Lee) of favorite songs that choirs had sung under Schantz: Thomas Ford’s 1607 madrigal “Since First I Saw Your Face” and the hymn “With Your Presence, Lord.” There also were parodies of two Vespers standards: Gustav Holst’s “On This Day Earth Shall Ring” and the hymn “Von Himmel Hoch,” with new lyrics about the choir members’ affection for their director. Pettinelli and Volpato-Huntsberger prepared a slide-show tribute.

A benefit drawing allowed Schantz to subsidize his own scholarship by offering such prizes as “Fireside Dinner for Two, Chez Schantz” and three of his oils.